Middle class, the housing crisis is coming for you next | Hacker News Reader

Middle class, the housing crisis is coming for you next

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40 pointsuptown12 comments

This is why housing affordability should be tied to income, rather than willingness to go into debt. As with education, once the banks can get a guarantee that they will be bailed out in case of trouble (explicit with education, implicit with housing) the race to the bottom commences. Prices go to the moon, everyone ends up in debt slavery

There is a reason the church was so hard on usury. I hope it rediscovers the issue: it is the most pressing social justice issue of our time, cutting across all non-elite identity classes.

I would like to know more about this. What would it look like if housing prices were tied to income?

There are many ways to do it, but one method would be to limit loans to some multiple (say 3x) of someones trailing income (say 3 years). This could be scaled into over time to smooth out price adjustments.

Housing has been captured by people seeking a return on capital. There needs to be a recognition that housing prices rising faster than inflation and wages is overall bad thing.

That owning a home is sometimes the only way for middle and lower classes to build wealth (and even then, only in a handful of markets) is an indictment of a economy that's not robust and not working for the majority of people.

However, there are too many people making too much money off of housing that I would expect things to change soon.

Aren’t your first two paragraphs a contradiction ? if housing prices don’t rise above inflation how do middle and lower class households build wealth?

Historically, per Schiller, housing has tracked inflation in the US

High rents and debts are a massive drain on the economy. Less disposable income means less to spend on consumer goods and services, which hits real businesses hard, and leads to fewer jobs. The fictitious growth in the FIRE sector is not going to mask the growing death spiral in the rest of the economy forever.

There is a surplus of houses around Chicago. Go there instead of complain that CA rents are too high. If you hate snow so much that you'll pay $500,000 to avoid it, YOU have a problem.

chicago is also significantly better positioned for climate change than california, at least SoCal

This is just the obvious result of everyone wanting to cluster around a city center, and slowly expanding outward. With the new advances in technology we have today, we should start innovating new models of work for those who do not need to be in physical proximity (i.e mass remote work for those whose jobs lend to that). Most people who live close to the city (say a radius of 20-30 miles) do so only out of work obligations.

It's telling that even the companies developing these technologies try to pack people as closely together as physically possible. Either there's no substitute for physical proximity, or we've failed to discover it despite the massive financial incentives.

I'm going to say it's completely opposite. I worked for a video chat company and the company was dramatically more productive on the whole when we had a substantial remote contingent. We were forced to use our product on the regular and understood our use case. When the company moved to consolidate, productivity suffered.

Why consolidate, then? Mostly for the advantage of the people whose jobs were social. I don't think it was malicious, but I also don't think it was what was best for the company.

City planning documents have also consistently focused on the need for housing options for teachers, firefighters...

I’ve got an idea. Both of these jobs are considered essential for a functioning society and are paid by taxpayers. Why not just pay them more? There is no reason that teachers and other public sector professionals should be “low income workers”.

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